Reading Time: 12 minutes Effective marketing begins with reliable information about your customers and your campaigns. That’s where email analytics tools come in. They help you analyze customer engagement, optimize email performance, and drive meaningful growth. But in a sea of tools that promise ‘insight,’ it’s hard to know where to start. Whether you are a solo marketer or part of a larger team, finding email analytics software that aligns with your goals can make all the difference between guesswork and identifying your growth funnel. This blog post reviews some of the best email marketing analytics tools to set up reliable, actionable campaign reporting. What is an Email Analytics Tool? An email analytics tool is software that tracks, measures, and reports key email marketing performance metrics of your campaign, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. This enables marketers to develop informed, data-driven strategies that boost ROI and help in personalizing campaigns. The data shared by the tool depends on how advanced it is. It further taps into the behavioral side of your customer, such as customer journeys.   5 Benefits of Using Email Marketing Analytics Tools For lack of better words, intuition is good in marketing, but data is better. With email marketing analytics software, you can know your customers like the back of your hand, deliver hyper-targeted and behavior-triggered marketing campaigns, and always be sure of your actions. Put simply, email analytics tools turn raw data into actionable insights, and here’s how you can level up your game using them: Improve Campaign Performance: Analytics tools provide data on what’s workingby focusing on key conversion metrics and customer behavior. This helps you make data-backed tweaks to email content, subject lines, delivery times, offers, and more, leading to better email engagement and results. Understand Your Audience Better: Your email analytics software will reveal insights into your audience’s behavior, preferences, and habits with just a few clicks. It’s crucial to know when your readers open and engage with emails, which CTA they interact with the most, and what offers they’re likely to click on. This is because it empowers you with incredibly valuable insights to create personalized and relevant messaging. Improved Targeting and Personalization: 78% of marketers agree to rely heavily on personalization for their email marketing campaigns. Analyzing data on customers’ behavior and preferences helps you understand your audience better and tailor campaigns to their specific interests and needs. This can lead to higher engagement and better response rates. Optimize Send Times and Frequency: Since 61% of customers prefer receiving promotional emails weekly, your tool could be used to customize and create emails specifically for your audience. As a result, instead of relying on guesswork about when to send, you can determine the optimal time and cadence based on real customer behavior. This reduces unsubscribe rates and makes your emails more likely to be read. Identify and Segment High-Value Leads: The most significant benefit of using email marketing analytics software is knowing your core audience versus those who will never take action, saving you thousands of marketing dollars. These tools are designed to identify which customers are most engaged, enabling you to build targeted segments for follow-up campaigns. Understanding the value of what an email analytics tool can do for you is the first step, but picking the right tool is where the magic begins. Let’s break down the key factors to assess.   How to Choose the Right Email Marketing Analytics Software Picking the right tool can be overwhelming when you have so many options. But the best tool is the one that’s right for your business goals, team, and depth of insights needed. So, before you make the plunge, here are the key factors to consider. Let’s go over them in detail. Metrics and Reporting Abilities: Your email analytics software should identify top-performing audience segments, highlight geographical and device trends, and uncover content preferences across subject lines, visuals, and text. Most importantly, it should track conversions and attribute revenue, helping you connect every campaign to real business impact. Integration with Your Tech Stack: Today’s email marketing analytics tools must be self-sufficient and smoothly integrate with your tech and marketing ecosystem, such as your CRM, CDP, Ecommerce, or internal marketing automation software. The more your platform works smoothly with your entire tech stack, the swifter its implementation and usage. Integrated systems reduce manual jobs, eliminate silos and empower your teams to collaborate and work smarter. Real-Time Analytics: Real-time analytics allows you to monitor and optimize performance on the go and serve your customers with the best possible experience. It lets the marketing team respond to customers’ needs instantly, adjust campaigns in real time, and improve campaign ROI. Ease of Use: When picking a tool, always check for intuitive navigation, visual reporting, customizable dashboards, and precise documentation. A user-friendly tool will speed up execution, reduce ‘handover’ time, and allow your team to move quickly from insight to action. Scalability: The final question that remains, is the platform scalable? Does it have enough capabilities to grow with your business, audience, and campaign scale? Choosing a scalable platform protects you from future roadblocks, avoids costly migrations, and ensures your investment continues to deliver long-term. Once you have narrowed down your choices based on your overall goal, the next step is to analyze the tool based on its offers and your needs. Not all email analytics tools are created equal, and understanding which capabilities are essential to you can save money, time, and frustration.   5 Key Features to Look for in an Email Analytics Software While the basic features remain the same, all email analytics tools will have a hero feature that shines, one that will let you experiment with content formats and style. Meanwhile, another will have the most gorgeous data visualization of your campaign reports you have ever seen. Your job is to pick what works best for you. Let’s examine a list of features that go beyond basic metrics and improve customer engagement. 1. Detailed Campaign Insights Your email analytics tool should help you turn data into insight, and insight into action. This means the tool must provide real-time insights on campaign performance, including detailed metrics like email open rates or click-through rates. Marketers can use this feature to monitor live campaigns and quickly identify customer trends or issues that need immediate action. Here’s what a tool’s dashboard on campaign performance looks like, once the email has been sent. Why this is a key criterion: Having real-time visibility on data that helps you make better decisions for your customers beats any other feature by miles. It’s a marketer’s opportunity to pivot, optimize, engage, or build on campaigns. 2. Custom Dashboards Custom dashboards show you charts and tables to digest customer data swiftly and clearly. They allow you to build tailored views of your core metrics, pulling in data points that matter most to your unique goals. Whether it is campaign performance, audience segmentation, or simply the result of an A/B test experience, these dashboards provide a sharp glance at once to maximize ROI. Your tool’s custom dashboard should allow multiple reports to be created for a desired destination. These reports should have different granularities, such as time ranges, chart types, or tables, just like the one below. Why this is a key criterion: Custom dashboards cut through the noise by allowing you to focus on metrics that matter, eventually boosting efficiency and the ability to make strategic decisions fast. 3. Automated A/B Testing Automated A/B testing can help marketing teams save time, effort, and resources, especially when dealing with hundreds of emails at once. This feature automates the A/B test of your email campaigns, enabling you to test different content, time, frequency, offers, and content blocks, automatically selecting the winning variant. Why this is a key criterion: Marketers rely on it to continuously improve performance, remove guesswork, and bring out the best of their campaigns, not assumptions. 4. Campaign Error Breakdown The campaign error breakdown, a little-talked-about feature of the email marketing world, tells marketers why their campaigns fail. Was it due to an invalid address, poor optimization, spam complaints, or a technical error? This granular reporting can save teams thousands of dollars in marketing money by simply diagnosing the issue and refining their lists and templates for better delivery. Why this is a key criterion: Understanding why your brand emails are not hitting the right inbox is crucial for healthy email list management and ensuring your messages reach the inbox, not the spam folder. 5. Link Click Tracking through Click Maps This feature can be rather beautiful. Its ability to use hot and cold colors and tell marketers exactly where their customers are clicking—a simple breakdown highlighting the hotspots of engagement—makes it attractive. It’s an intuitive feature that helps marketers quickly identify which links, buttons, and content or images in the email have drawn the maximum attention from customers. Why this is a key criterion: With these insights, teams can build on their content, refine email layouts, and place the messaging where it draws maximum attention to boost conversion. Heatmaps turn raw click data into digestible insight.   How to Integrate Email Marketing Analytics Tools Into Your Martech Stack Pro tip: Invite not just your growth team, but also your product, engineering, and data teams before you begin any migration-related task. This is also when your team should export all relevant events, metric nomenclature, and other platform-specific jobs to ensure the migration doesn’t fail. Now, as you begin the mammoth task of integrating email marketing analytics into your Martech, know that it’s not just a technical step, but a strategic one. When done right, it provides a single source of truth for customer insights and allows you to create consistent, data-driven experiences across every touchpoint. 1. Auditing Your Current Martech Stack A Martech stack audit before you begin will tell you everything you need to move forward. Where is the data flowing from? Which source reports on customer activity? Are there any duplications in metrics? Does the data in your CRM tool align with the data in your email tool? Is your campaign data properly flowing into your analytics platforms for reporting? A thorough audit will reveal all of this and more, which should be documented for all relevant teams to sign off on and learn from. Defining what gets shared ensures every tool gets the data it needs, eliminates blind spots, and creates a unified view of your customers. 2. Defining Key Metrics and Integration Goals Before you unplug your current system, you need to know exactly which key fits into which lock. Were you tracking and digging deeper into behavioral trends to measure campaign ROI, or were your campaigns defined at a surface level? Outlining what success looks like for your email analytics tool at the start opens up avenues for exact paths to follow, processes to set, and establishes clear guidelines. This can be done once your integration KPIs are set, for precise outcomes. Without clear email marketing metrics and goals, you risk drowning in data with no direction. Defining success upfront keeps integration linear, focused, and impactful. 3. Configuring Data Flow and Synchronization To maximize the output of your integration, ensure your data moves smoothly, accurately, and in real time. Set up your data pipelines carefully, double-check events and field mappings, and test for accuracy across platforms. Ensure your events and email metrics match and align with your CRM, marketing automation, and BI dashboards. Flawless data flow means fewer silos and blind spots, eventually enabling marketing teams to run campaigns smoothly with reliable insights. It ensures every team, from marketing to growth, operates with the same playbook. 4. Choosing the Right Email Analytics Tool After a thorough scan of the email marketing analytics software on the market, selecting the right one for your tech stack can feel overwhelming. Even when all the tools look the same, they differ in terms of the value they bring. Some can bring advanced data visualization, while others are ahead of everyone by using AI-powered features. Some may have a massive CRM ecosystem, while others may be seamless and intuitive to use — you have to prioritize your and your team’s needs, and future growth. The right tool is excellent for what you need today and promising for what you need tomorrow. It sets you up for long-term success. 5. Documentation. Training. Handover. Everything we have discussed so far will be useless if your team finds it difficult to use the new tool. While each tool will have its own set of best practices for onboarding a new client, the following flow works best. Set up a video onboarding session, and share its recording Send out detailed, easy-to-digest navigational documents Appoint a POC and have them set up initial campaigns Set up bi-monthly checkpoints to refine workflows and adaptation Weekly blocker and feedback sessions This process will also allow you to gather insights on what keeps your team at bay, highlight challenges, and enable the marketing tool to set customers up for success. Empowered teams turn integrated tools into business results.   5 Best Email Analytics Tools for Assessing Performance Email personalization, using data and insights to fuel campaigns, cross-channel marketing, and now leaning on AI to optimize campaigns and workflows aren’t just a ‘good-to-have’ feature anymore, but a must-have. Collectively, these features shape a brand’s image and how customers experience their product. Here’s a round-up of the top email analytics tools, each standing out in its unique specialization. 1. Best for AI-Powered Campaign Reporting: MoEngage MoEngage is a customer engagement and data platform that offers deep analytics across email, push notifications, SMS, and more. It unifies data to provide a single view of cross-channel interaction with customers. Its AI-powered optimization insights and journey mapping tool allow brands to design compelling and contextual emails based on customers’ behavior, preferences, life cycles, and even future trends. What stands out about the solution: MoEngage suggests the best email send times and content recommendations, which makes crafting email marketing campaigns easier, even for teams without deep technical expertise. Some of the world’s biggest brands, like SoundCloud and Poshmark, use MoEngage for its AI-powered predictive analytics, allowing them to tailor their campaigns to customers’ next best actions. 2. Best for Advanced Segmentation: Mailchimp Marketing teams of all sizes adore Mailchimp’s user-friendly and intuitive interface. The platform excels in providing reports on email open rates, performance, conversion, and segmentation. Specifically, its visualized dashboards give you actionable insights about your audience’s behavior. For example, you’ll know which subscribers are responding to what kinds of email content, making it easier to segment them. What stands out about the solution: Mailchimp lets you compare your campaign performance over a specified time frame. This allows you to gain more detailed insights into engagement and revenue metrics that matter most to your email campaigns. 3. Best for Funnels: GetResponse GetResponse is a popular choice for brands looking to build robust email marketing workflows without needing a developer. It stands out in its ability to monitor deep engagement workflows, fine-tune strategies, offer recommendations, and scale campaigns effortlessly. The tool offers a wide range of automation templates and funnel-building options for marketing teams to create campaigns quickly. What stands out about the solution: GetResponse goes beyond the basic functionalities of your email analytics tool and offers top-notch features like lead scoring and conversion funnels, all in one place. For teams that want to map out complex journeys, GetResponse’s visual workflow builder is a steal. 4. Best for Dynamic Dashboards: ActiveCampaign ActiveCampaign is a one-stop shop that combines marketing automation with detailed email analytics, making it the go-to tool for small to mid-sized businesses. It tracks every customer touchpoint and ties it back to email behavior, making automation seamless. Furthermore, its custom reports and tagging options allow marketers to segment contacts in specific ways. With its shareable and dynamic dashboards, you don’t need to shuffle through your data anymore to figure out the most important email metrics. What stands out about the solution: ActiveCampaign offers site and event tracking, so email engagement can be connected directly to customer behavior. It also blends email analytics directly into automated workflows, allowing marketers to tweak campaigns in real time. 5. Best for Personalized Benchmarks: Klaviyo Klaviyo helps brands connect the dots with data and build long-term relationships. It offers personalized benchmarks to help you compare your metrics to those of your competitors. Klaviyo can create real-time email performance metrics tied directly to revenue, allowing an immediate peek into campaign performance and making ROI tracking effortless. It also has automated flows for major events like cart abandonment and post-purchase follow-ups for built-in performance benchmarking. What stands out about the solution: Klaviyo’s detailed revenue attribution reporting provides brands with crystal-clear insights into driving sales.     Take Your Pick From the Best Email Analytics Tools We have discussed at length what makes a powerful email marketing analytics tool. Robust features like real-time insights, error diagnostics, and visual heat maps complement a solid data visualization and the tool’s ability to read customer data and tie it back to the email marketing campaign. MoEngage offers a robust suite to help marketers optimize every email and drive meaningful results. Take the next step towards more intelligent email marketing — schedule your demo today. The post Best Email Analytics Tools for Setting Up Campaign Reporting appeared first on MoEngage. #best #email #analytics #tools #setting

Of all of its ingredients, it’s perhaps the signature pepperoncini at Papa Johns that most differentiates the pizza chain from its competitors. Papa Johns places one of its Mediterranean-grown pepperoncinis in every pizza box along with complimentary garlic dipping sauce. Like fortune cookies at a Chinese restaurant or Andes mints at Olive Garden, these freebies are a bit of hospitality meant to delight customers and build loyalty in a notably unfaithful fast-food category. Now Papa Johns is taking the pepperoncini a step further by placing it right into your drink: “Cini Dirty Soda” is citrus soda with a zesty, pepper kick. How Papa Johns went all in on a pepper brand The brand expansion is happening at a time when Papa Johns is investing million more in marketing this year to improve on its 1% year-over-year revenue growth. While such shocking food collabs are nothing new, in this case the pizza chain has been working pepperoncini deeper into its brand for a while now. Papa Johns released a new brand identity last year that includes a pepperoncini yellow-green in its color palette alongside colors like reds that evoke sauces and pepperonis.Coupled with a doughy custom font called Pappy, it’s a brand that’s designed to remind you of pizza with a free side of pepper. Now the pepperoncini has become the inspiration behind a limited-edition drink with Mountain Dew. Rather than selling the drink in its stores, Papa Johns made it as a limited-edition, do-it-yourself kit available only online. The Papa Johns recipe calls for 8 ounces of Mountain Dew and a quarter ounce of pepperoncini brine with a pepperoncini-brine-and-Italian-seasoning rim and a pepperoncini for garnish. It already sold out, and Papa Johns says it was one of the most engaged sweepstakes the chain has ever done. “The dirty-soda trend is on the rise, and with our revamped approach we thought it was the perfect opportunity to infiltrate culture with our iconic fan-favorite garnish,” Papa Johns CMO Jenna Bromberg tells Fast Company. “Our quality ingredients are our point of differentiation, which is where we’re focusing as a brand.” The “Cini Dirty Soda” taps into the dirty-soda craze of shops like Swig and Sodalicious while embracing the trend toward adventurous flavor profiles for products like the pickle soda Popeyes released last month. It also links the pizza chain to Mountain Dew, a soda brand that recently overhauled its visual identity and is making investments in becoming more culturally relevant. For a category as competitive as pizza, such small gestures as a free pepper and sauce can go a long way toward growing and cementing loyalty. Papa Johns is finding new ways to lean into its signature freebie. #papa #johns #turned #its #food

Leading healthcare organizations across the globe are using agentic AI, robotics and digital twins of medical environments to enhance surgical precision, boost workflow efficiency, improve medical diagnoses and more. Physical AI and humanoid robots in hospitals have the potential to automate routine tasks, assist with patient care and address workforce shortages. This is especially crucial in places where challenges to optimal healthcare services are paramount. Such challenges include hospital overcrowding, an aging population, rising healthcare costs and a shortage of medical professionals, all of which are affecting Taiwan, as well as many other regions and countries. At the COMPUTEX trade show in Taipei, NVIDIA today showcased how leading Taiwan medical centers are collaborating with top system builders to integrate smart hospital technologies and other AI-powered healthcare solutions that can help reduce these issues and save millions of lives. Cathay General Hospital, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, National Taiwan University Hospitaland Taichung Veterans General Hospitalare among the top centers in the region pioneering healthcare AI innovation. Deployed in collaboration with leading system builders such as Advantech, Onyx, Foxconn and YUAN, these solutions tap into NVIDIA’s agentic AI and robotics technologies, including the NVIDIA Holoscan and IGX platforms, NVIDIA Jetson for embedded computing and NVIDIA Omniverse for simulating virtual worlds with OpenUSD. CGMH Boosts AI-Powered Medical Imaging With an average of 8.2 million outpatient visits and 2.4 million hospitalizations a year,  CGMH estimates that a third of the Taiwanese population has sought treatment at its vast network of hospitals in Taipei and seven other cities. The organization is pioneering smart hospital innovation by enhancing surgical precision and workflow efficiency through advanced, AI-powered colonoscopy workflow solutions, developed in collaboration with Advantech and based on the NVIDIA Holoscan platform, which includes the Holoscan SDK and the Holoscan Sensor Bridge running on NVIDIA IGX. NVIDIA Holoscan is a real-time sensor processing platform for edge AI compute, while NVIDIA IGX offers enterprise-ready, industrial edge AI purpose-built for medical environments. Using these platforms, CGMH is accelerating AI integration in its colonoscopy diagnostics procedures. Deployed in gastrointestinal consultation rooms, the AI-powered tool collects colonoscopy streams to train a customized model built on Holoscan and provides real-time colonic polyps identification and classification. Colonoscopy tools at CGMH. Image courtesy of CGMH. CGMH’s AI infrastructure — comprising NVIDIA accelerated computing, NVIDIA DGX systems, the MONAI framework, NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM open-source library, NVIDIA Dynamo inference framework, and the NVIDIA NeMo and Clara platforms — enables accelerated research and development across the organization. CGMH serves nearly 50 AI agent models that daily help the hospital analyze medical imaging, improving diagnostic accuracy, throughput and real-time inference at scale. For example, NVIDIA Triton-powered AI sped newborn examination record processing by 10x. Cathay General Hospital Improves Diagnostics With AI Cathay General Hospital, a Taipei-based healthcare center that provides hospital management and medical services, has collaborated with National Taiwan University Hospital, medical computer manufacturer Onyx and software provider aetherAI to develop an AI-assisted colonoscopy system that highlights lesions, detects hard-to-spot polyps and issues alerts to help physicians with diagnoses. Polyp detection during colonoscopy. Image courtesy of aetherAI and Onyx. Powered by a compact, plug-and-play AI BOX device — built with the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier module — the AI system is trained on over 400,000 high-quality, physician-annotated images collected from patients with diverse and severe lesions over four years. The system can achieve up to 95.8% accuracy and sensitivity, and studies have shown that it can improve adenoma detection rates by up to 30%. These enhancements assist physicians in reducing diagnostic errors and making more informed treatment decisions, ultimately contributing to improved patient outcomes. NTUH Detects Liver Tumors, Cardiovascular Risks With AI In the 100+ years since its founding, NTUH has nurtured countless professionals in medicine and is renowned for its trusted clinical care. The national teaching hospital is now adopting AI imaging to more quickly, accurately diagnose patients. NTUH’s HeaortaNet model, trained on more than 70,000 axial images from 200 patients, automates CT scan segmentation of the heart, including the aorta and other arteries, in 3D, enabling rapid analysis of risks for cardiovascular disease. The model, which achieves high segmentation accuracy for the pericardium and aorta, significantly reduced data processing time per case from an hour to about 0.4 seconds. In addition, NTUH collaborated with the Good Liver Foundation and system builder YUAN to develop a diagnostic-assistance system for liver cancer detection during ultrasounds. It taps into an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX module and a deep learning model trained on more than 5,000 annotated ultrasound images to identify malignant and benign liver tumors in real time. YUAN and NTUH’s liver cancer detection system turns an ultrasound device into an AI-assisted diagnostic tool. Image courtesy of YUAN. NVIDIA DeepStream and TensorRT SDKs accelerate the system’s deep learning model, ultimately helping clinicians detect tumors earlier and more reliably. In addition, NTUH is using NVIDIA DGX to train AI models for its system that detects pancreatic cancer from CT scans. TCVGH Streamlines Multimodal Imaging and Clinical Documentation Workflows With AI  Taichung Veterans General Hospital, a medical center and a teaching hospital administered by the Veterans Affairs Council in Taipei, has partnered with Foxconn to build physical and digital robots to augment staffing, improving clinician productivity and patient experiences. Foxconn developed an AI system that can analyze medical images and spot signs of breast cancer earlier than traditional methods, using NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, NVIDIA DGX systems and the MONAI framework. By tapping into clinical data and multimodal AI imaging, the system creates 3D virtual breast models, quickly highlighting areas of concern in scans to help radiologists make faster, more confident decisions. Foxconn is also working with TCVGH to build smart hospital solutions like the AI nursing collaborative robot Nurabot and tapping into NVIDIA Omniverse to create real-time digital twins of hospital environments, including nursing stations, patient wards and corridors. These digital replicas serve as high-fidelity simulations where Jetson-powered service robots can be trained to autonomously deliver medical supplies throughout the hospital, ultimately improving care efficiency. AI nursing collaborative robot Nurabot. Image courtesy of Foxconn. In addition, TCVGH has developed and deployed its Co-Healer system, which integrates the Taiwanese native large language model TAIDE-LX-7B to streamline clinical documentation processes with agentic AI. Co-Healer, built on the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX module, processes and helps summarize medical documents — such as nursing progress notes and health education materials — and supports medical exam preparation by providing students with instant access to nursing guidelines and patient-specific protocols for clinical procedures and diagnostic tests. This helps healthcare workers alleviate burnout while giving patients a clearer understanding of their diagnoses. Learn more about the latest AI advancements in healthcare at NVIDIA GTC Taipei, running May 21-22 at COMPUTEX. #thats #one #smart #hospital #taiwan

It’s finally possible to purchase an audiobook from Spotify’s iPhone app with just a few taps. On Monday, Spotify announced that Apple approved an update that allows users in the US to see audiobook pricing within the app and buy individual audiobooks outside the App Store. The update also lets Spotify Premium subscribers purchase additional audiobook listening hours. This change follows last month’s Epic Games vs. Apple ruling, which upended the iPhone maker’s control over the App Store. Under the ruling, Apple can’t collect fees on purchases made outside the app store, nor can it govern how developers point to external purchases. Spotify submitted the update last week, but now it’s official. The music streaming service pulled audiobook purchases from its iOS app in 2022 after accusing Apple of “choking competition” with App Store rules that made it more difficult to purchase audiobooks. Spotify also started letting iPhone users purchase subscriptions outside the App Store earlier this month. The iOS apps for Kindle, Patreon, and Delta’s emulator have also taken advantage of the court ruling, but Epic Games is still fighting to bring Fortnite back to the App Store. “This change lowers the barriers for more users to embrace their first — or tenth — audiobook, while allowing publishers and authors to reach fans and access new audiences seamlessly,” Spotify said in its announcement. #spotifys #iphone #app #will #now

#foxconn #taps #nvidia #accelerate #physical

Macworld One of the frustrations of setting up a new computer is downloading, installing, and logging into all the various applications I use every day. But whenever I set up a new Mac, I’m happy to download and install Rocket—the first app I install on any new Mac. In fact, it’s one of the utilities I miss most when I have to use a Windows PC. Rocket is a simple, free utility from Matthew Palmer that adds Slack-style emoji typing throughout your system. That’s it, that’s all it does. If you spend all day on Slack like I do, you know how fast and easy it is to add emojis. Type a colonfollowed immediately by a search term, and a little pop-up emoji picker shows relevant emojis. You can pick one from the listor keep typing to narrow it down and just press Enter. The Slack emoji picker is great. With Rocket you can have it everywhere.Foundry It makes using emoji, which I use a lot, an intuitive part of the typing process instead of a separate activity. Rocket simply makes that same emoji typing experience available system-wide. There are a few welcome options, such as the ability to disable Rocket when using certain apps in which it interferes, or when on certain websites. You can choose a custom skin one for relevant emojis, too. There’s a Rocket Pro upgrade that adds the ability to build a library of custom GIFs or images that you can summon the same way, along with some stats and text expander snippets. I’m happy to pay, but I never use any of those features. If I had to make a request, it would be to allow for a simple way to look at emoji variants in the picker. Many emojis these days have multiple variations, and it would be great to find one with a few taps of the keyboard. The preferred default skin tone selection handles some of them, but you don’t always want to change up a whole default just to get the right variant of one or two emojis. And not every emoji variation is a skin tone. But hey, it’s free, it’s lightweight, it’s kept up to date, and it makes my Mac more enjoyable to use. It’s hard to complain about that. #first #thing #install #every #new

In 2017, interior designer Lisa Koch, who had recently finished decorating The Faena in Miami, met hotelier Jeff Klein at the Sunset Tower in Los Angeles. He hired her on the spot to freshen up the Art Deco landmark: “I was extremely drawn to Lisa because she wanted to respect the soul and listen to the history and bones of the building,” says Klein, who also owns notable properties like the San Vicente Bungalows and The Jane Hotel. Two years later, Klein and his husband, producer John Goldwyn, purchased a nearby 1937 property built in the style of a 19th-century French manor—and knew Koch could transform the interiors into an inviting and transporting oasis inspired by its original architectural blueprints.Interior designer Lisa Koch sits in the curved breakfast room. “I found this French 1960s chandelier at Carlos de la Puente in New York and sent a picture of it to Jeff,” she says. “He replies yes, go ahead—so I brought it back to Los Angeles.” The house project took her almost five years to perfect. “Jeff and I are quite aesthetically aligned,” Koch says. “We didn’t come into each room with a distinct vision but rather it unfolded very naturally.” With the help of architect Ward Jewell, nearly every inch of the house was overhauled, from the climbing rose-covered stucco exterior walls and dove gray shutters to intricate arched foyers and a walk-in walnut bar. A guest house was removed to maximize space for the gardens by landscape designer Lisa Zeger, and a large swimming pool was replaced with a smaller one at the rear of the property. Unstained French oak floors sourced from an old English country estate cover every room except the kitchen and gym, with each plank laid with uneven spacing to exude the sense they’ve settled, like the house, with time. “Our intention was to respect the integrity of the property so it didn’t feel like a 1970s house Halston could have lived in,” Klein says.In the living room, pigmented plaster done by hand and applied paneling on the walls were inspired by the late-1930s architectural appeal of the original house. “We added thickness to the walls to allow for paneled casing around the French door and windows,” Koch says. Above the fireplace encased in an Italian marble mantle from Jamb hangs an inset brass-trimmed antique mirror that reflects light from the gardens. The painting on the far wall is by Jean Dubuffet, while the sofas are from Roman Thomas. In the living room, dentil crown molding, pigmented plaster, and decorative paneling were added to convey the original 1930s architecture, while the walls were thickened to include detailed casings around the French doors. An inset brass-trimmed antique mirror sits above the Italian marble mantle by Jamb, while a Jean Dubuffet painting hangs beside the grand piano. Pocket doors lead into the library, where a chandelier that belonged to Lord Mountbatten vies with Rosie Uniacke periwinkle armchairs. “We had planned on making the walnut paneling dark and bought dozens of stain samples but in order to remove the cathedral wood grain patterns we had to bleach it out multiple times,” Koch explains. “But after we lightened it, it looked much better, so it was a happy accident.” Above the fireplace, a projector unfurls from the ceiling, allowing it to double as a screening room. A 1958 pen and ink watercolor by Jean Cocteau—the first piece the couple ever bought together—stands between shelves lined with antiquarian and art books. “John is a voracious reader and very particular about organizing his books,” Klein muses.Glass pendants from Gordiola hang above a 19th-century French table in the kitchen that had once been a small room with a fireplace and two sofas. Koch completely reconfigured the space to accommodate large prep stations, two Miele dishwashers on either side of a double integrated marble sink, and a walnut paneled pantry with sawtooth adjustable shelves. It connects to a butler’s pantry equipped with open shelving and a second Subzero refrigerator. A skylight and the pitched ceiling was installed to allow natural light to pour in throughout the day. A proper corridor bar was built into a hallway next to the pantry to replace the original smaller one in the library. Paneled in walnut, the interior glass shelving sits in front of an antique mirror illuminated by backlighting. Salmon marble countertops on the sink and bar mix with colorful Murano glassware on shelves along the window. A grid of antique European maps framed in burlwood on the walls nods to Klein and Goldwyn’s love of travel and history. The kitchen was completely reconfigured with a high-pitched ceiling and a skylight, where sea green pendants from Barcelona hang above a 19th-century French table and a pantry displays Goldwyn’s collection of copper pots and pans he found in the Cotswolds, Paris, and the Hamptons. A dark hallway off the kitchen became a breakfast room with curved floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lily pond and a 1960s candelabra. “We didn’t stick to any formula, but rather purposefully chose furnishings from various centuries and provenances,” Koch says. Pieces found during their travels range from chandeliers and busts bought at Flair in Florence to antique Irish dining room chairs and 17th-century Four Seasons goddess statues salvaged from a torn down European count’s palazzo which now line the pool.Alongside the curved windowed walls of the breakfast room, Lisa Zeder installed a circular pond with floating Egyptian lotuses, lily pads, and a bubbling fountain. Climbing vines, rosemary, jasmine, and lush varieties of flowering perennials in planting beds border the Belgian antique cobblestone terrace. “We wanted every room to have views of the gardens, so the original staircase was moved and reduced into a spiral shape with a banister I found in France,” she explains. An oval ceiling oculus was added above, as well as a proper foyer where Robert Polidori’s 1986 photograph of Versailles’s interiors hangs beside an antique table with carved lion’s paw feet. Leading into the primary sitting room, a nook with a George Smith sofa is surrounded by prints by English artist Rose Wylie. “They were cut out of an art auction catalogue and framed in burlwood—I’m not too grand to admit that,” Klein says with a laugh. In the primary bedroom, a four-poster by Rose Tarlow flanks a Francis Bacon lithograph and working marble fireplace. Three sets of French doors lead out to a balcony with aerial views of the gardens, terraces, and round lily pond.A loggia with four arches was installed to allow views of the terrace and gardens below, and the exterior walls are clad in stucco. Old Belgian pavers cover the floor while a wooden ceiling gives the space both texture and intimacy. Liza Zeder Design Group designed the arrangements of plants, ferns, and trees in antique pots. The furniture is a mix of custom and vintage Baker upholstered in Pierre Frey fabric. “The loggia truly connects the interior to the exterior,” Koch says. “We didn’t want anything in here to feel like it belonged strictly inside or outside.” A sense of quiet serenity radiates from a rectangular lily pond directly across from the front entrance to the house, setting the tranquil tone of the property. Verdant hedges, vines, and lush flowering bushes of white rain lilies surround its borders. An outdoor fireplace and seating area on the south side of the house adorns the upper terrace, where grass pavers reclaimed from Belgium imbue a geometric motif. The exterior furniture is Formations and McKinnon Harris. The much-frequented spot has become a calming respite for Klein and Goldwyn and often used whenever they’re hosting friends or having parties. Goldwyn, an avid gardener who can often be found with pruning shears in his pockets, and Klein collected all of the art together by trawling through flea markets, antique stores, or auction houses. Meanwhile, in a former concrete open box with irregular walls, a loggia with four classical arches and Belgian antique pavers was built in the downstairs entry hall with lush potted plants and succulents selected by Liza Zeder. “Every night, we sit in the loggia, turn on music, and have a drink while watching the sunset,” Klein says. “The light dapples across the gardens and the smell of jasmine wafts into the house—I look forward to it everyday.”The façade of the house remains largely unchanged since it was built back in 1937. The steel troweled, unpainted stucco exterior wall finishes were designed to patina and crack with age, French ardoise slate covers the roof, and three dormers inspired by the original architectural plans were refabricated. Climbing white, orange, and pink French roses from Rose Story Farm in Carpinteria cover virtually all of the exterior walls, blooming four to five times a year. Limestone steps and dove gray wooden shutters were added while the French copper lantern hanging above the door is circa 1880. Floor to ceiling shelves and cabinetry were installed in the primary sitting room to accommodate books and photographs. Chairs and a sofa from George Smith create a cozy reading nook underneath artist Rose Wylie’s framed prints, and French doors lead to a terrace that looks out to the back gardens. Goldwyn, a producer, reads at least two books a week—from novels to European histories—as well as countless Hollywood scripts. The sitting room also includes a hidden midnight kitchen. In the dining room, curved walls cladded in linen juxtapose a late-19th-century French dining table surrounded by antique Irish chairs upholstered in burgundy leather from Hawker. Klein and Goldywn found the chandelier at Flair during a trip to Florence, while the mauve silk rug was custom designed. “We open the French doors leading to the upper terrace surrounded by flowers during dinner parties—and you can hear the peaceful murmur of the fountain in the lily pond,” Klein says. Cased in light walnut wood paneling, the library features blue armchairs by Rose Uniacke, a 19th-century Italian card table that seats four, and a sofa and coffee table from Roman Thomas. In addition to the two tall bookcases, low shelves line the side walls to accommodate the hanging of art. Perched upon the Jamb fireplace mantel is a Jean Cocteau pen and ink watercolor from 1958. On the right, three sets of French doors provide direct access to the back garden. In the primary bedroom that adjoins the sitting room, an intricately paneled octagonal coved ceiling was built to add height and scale. A very pale pink plaster was applied to the walls while the furniture is a mix of Rose Tarlow and bespoke pieces all upholstered in cream velvet fabric by Nobilis. The doors flanking the bed lead to matching closets and bathrooms, while French doors on the south wall open out to a balcony. The lithograph is by Francis Bacon and a pop-up lift for a television comes out of the custom curved desk. One of the two identical primary suite bathrooms, which connect to the walk-in closet and the primary bedroom, features walls clad in full slabs of Calacatta viola. Unstained antique French oak sourced from an old country home in England used throughout the majority of the house covers the floors. “We added a pitched ceiling for additional height along with a Jamb hanging globe,” Koch adds. All the plumbing fixtures are Waterworks while the vanity was custom made. Painted in an obsidian dark green high gloss lacquer from Fine Paints of Europe, the downstairs powder room opens into a floor-to-ceiling mirrored alcove. Koch added traditional crosshead basin taps from Lefroy Brooks to the custom-made marble and bronze vanity with an integrated marble sink. The room looks out to the front garden while full marble slabs cover the lower walls and floors, imbuing a seamless visual high impact. The sconces were found on 1stDibs. The breakfast room off the kitchen furnishes a generous view of the garden due to the installation of a curved window. “The Paul McCobb dining chairs, which originally belonged to my clients, were restored and reupholstered in ultra suede,” Koch says. A French 1960s bronze chandelier hangs above the limestone dining table and, on the opposite wall, Koch designed floor-to-ceiling cabinets to accommodate a collection of 19th-century silver and crystal glassware. A view of the back exterior of the house, which now features a loggia leading out to a rolling lawn and lush leafy gardens. To maximize the space of the gardens, a guest suite that had been added in the 1990s was removed from the north side of the house. All the landscaping and plantings were designed by Lisa Zeder Design Group. Below the terraces, Zeder set twelve linear Platanus x Acerifolia trees into beds teeming with green and white plantings—creating an homage to the style of old estate gardens in France and Italy. #tour #transformed #oasis #inspired #history

LangGraph Multi-Agent Swarm is a Python library designed to orchestrate multiple AI agents as a cohesive “swarm.” It builds on LangGraph, a framework for constructing robust, stateful agent workflows, to enable a specialized form of multi-agent architecture. In a swarm, agents with different specializations dynamically hand off control to one another as tasks demand, rather than a single monolithic agent attempting everything. The system tracks which agent was last active so that when a user provides the next input, the conversation seamlessly resumes with that same agent. This approach addresses the problem of building cooperative AI workflows where the most qualified agent can handle each sub-task without losing context or continuity. LangGraph Swarm aims to make such multi-agent coordination easier and more reliable for developers. It provides abstractions to link individual language model agentsinto one integrated application. The library comes with out-of-the-box support for streaming responses, short-term and long-term memory integration, and even human-in-the-loop intervention, thanks to its foundation on LangGraph. By leveraging LangGraphand fitting naturally into the broader LangChain ecosystem, LangGraph Swarm allows machine learning engineers and researchers to build complex AI agent systems while maintaining explicit control over the flow of information and decisions. LangGraph Swarm Architecture and Key Features At its core, LangGraph Swarm represents multiple agents as nodes in a directed state graph, edges define handoff pathways, and a shared state tracks the ‘active_agent’. When an agent invokes a handoff, the library updates that field and transfers the necessary context so the next agent seamlessly continues the conversation. This setup supports collaborative specialization, letting each agent focus on a narrow domain while offering customizable handoff tools for flexible workflows. Built on LangGraph’s streaming and memory modules, Swarm preserves short-term conversational context and long-term knowledge, ensuring coherent, multi-turn interactions even as control shifts between agents. LangGraph Swarm’s handoff tools let one agent transfer control to another by issuing a ‘Command’ that updates the shared state, switching the ‘active_agent’ and passing along context, such as relevant messages or a custom summary. While the default tool hands off the full conversation and inserts a notification, developers can implement custom tools to filter context, add instructions, or rename the action to influence the LLM’s behavior. Unlike autonomous AI-routing patterns, Swarm’s routing is explicitly defined: each handoff tool specifies which agent may take over, ensuring predictable flows. This mechanism supports collaboration patterns, such as a “Travel Planner” delegating medical questions to a “Medical Advisor” or a coordinator distributing technical and billing queries to specialized experts. It relies on an internal router to direct user messages to the current agent until another handoff occurs. State Management and Memory Managing state and memory is essential for preserving context as agents hand off tasks. By default, LangGraph Swarm maintains a shared state, containing the conversation history and an ‘active_agent’ marker, and uses a checkpointerto persist this state across turns. Also, it supports a memory store for long-term knowledge, allowing the system to log facts or past interactions for future sessions while keeping a window of recent messages for immediate context. Together, these mechanisms ensure the swarm never “forgets” which agent is active or what has been discussed, enabling seamless multi-turn dialogues and accumulating user preferences or critical data over time. When more granular control is needed, developers can define custom state schemas so each agent has its private message history. By wrapping agent calls to map the global state into agent-specific fields before invocation and merging updates afterward, teams can tailor the degree of context sharing. This approach supports workflows ranging from fully collaborative agents to isolated reasoning modules, all while leveraging LangGraph Swarm’s robust orchestration, memory, and state-management infrastructure. Customization and Extensibility LangGraph Swarm offers extensive flexibility for custom workflows. Developers can override the default handoff tool, which passes all messages and switches the active agent, to implement specialized logic, such as summarizing context or attaching additional metadata. Custom tools simply return a LangGraph Command to update state, and agents must be configured to handle those commands via the appropriate node types and state-schema keys. Beyond handoffs, one can redefine how agents share or isolate memory using LangGraph’s typed state schemas: mapping the global swarm state into per-agent fields before invocation and merging results afterward. This enables scenarios where an agent maintains a private conversation history or uses a different communication format without exposing its internal reasoning. For full control, it’s possible to bypass the high-level API and manually assemble a ‘StateGraph’: add each compiled agent as a node, define transition edges, and attach the active-agent router. While most use cases benefit from the simplicity of ‘create_swarm’ and ‘create_react_agent’, the ability to drop down to LangGraph primitives ensures that practitioners can inspect, adjust, or extend every aspect of multi-agent coordination. Ecosystem Integration and Dependencies LangGraph Swarm integrates tightly with LangChain, leveraging components like LangSmith for evaluation, langchain\_openai for model access, and LangGraph for orchestration features such as persistence and caching. Its model-agnostic design lets it coordinate agents across any LLM backend, and it’s available in both Pythonand JavaScript/TypeScript, making it suitable for web or serverless environments. Distributed under the MIT license and with active development, it continues to benefit from community contributions and enhancements in the LangChain ecosystem. Sample Implementation Below is a minimal setup of a two-agent swarm: from langchain_openai import ChatOpenAI from langgraph.checkpoint.memory import InMemorySaver from langgraph.prebuilt import create_react_agent from langgraph_swarm import create_handoff_tool, create_swarm model = ChatOpenAI# Agent "Alice": math expert alice = create_react_agent], prompt="You are Alice, an addition specialist.", name="Alice", ) # Agent "Bob": pirate persona who defers math to Alice bob = create_react_agent], prompt="You are Bob, a playful pirate.", name="Bob", ) workflow = create_swarmapp = workflow.compile) Here, Alice handles additions and can hand off to Bob, while Bob responds playfully but routes math questions back to Alice. The InMemorySaver ensures conversational state persists across turns. Use Cases and Applications LangGraph Swarm unlocks advanced multi-agent collaboration by enabling a central coordinator to dynamically delegate sub-tasks to specialized agents, whether that’s triaging emergencies by handing off to medical, security, or disaster-response experts, routing travel bookings between flight, hotel, and car-rental agents, orchestrating a pair-programming workflow between a coding agent and a reviewer, or splitting research and report generation tasks among researcher, reporter, and fact-checker agents. Beyond these examples, the framework can power customer-support bots that route queries to departmental specialists, interactive storytelling with distinct character agents, scientific pipelines with stage-specific processors, or any scenario where dividing work among expert “swarm” members boosts reliability and clarity. At the same time, LangGraph Swarm handles the underlying message routing, state management, and smooth transitions. In conclusion, LangGraph Swarm marks a leap toward truly modular, cooperative AI systems. Structured multiple specialized agents into a directed graph solves tasks that a single model struggles with, each agent handles its expertise, and then hands off control seamlessly. This design keeps individual agents simple and interpretable while the swarm collectively manages complex workflows involving reasoning, tool use, and decision-making. Built on LangChain and LangGraph, the library taps into a mature ecosystem of LLMs, tools, memory stores, and debugging utilities. Developers retain explicit control over agent interactions and state sharing, ensuring reliability, yet still leverage LLM flexibility to decide when to invoke tools or delegate to another agent. Check out the GitHub Page. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to join our 90k+ ML SubReddit. Sana HassanSana Hassan, a consulting intern at Marktechpost and dual-degree student at IIT Madras, is passionate about applying technology and AI to address real-world challenges. With a keen interest in solving practical problems, he brings a fresh perspective to the intersection of AI and real-life solutions.Sana Hassanhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sana-hassan/ByteDance Introduces Seed1.5-VL: A Vision-Language Foundation Model Designed to Advance General-Purpose Multimodal Understanding and ReasoningSana Hassanhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sana-hassan/Researchers from Tsinghua and ModelBest Release Ultra-FineWeb: A Trillion-Token Dataset Enhancing LLM Accuracy Across BenchmarksSana Hassanhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sana-hassan/Coding Agents See 75% Surge: SimilarWeb’s AI Usage Report Highlights the Sectors Winning and Losing in 2025’s Generative AI BoomSana Hassanhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sana-hassan/Rethinking Toxic Data in LLM Pretraining: A Co-Design Approach for Improved Steerability and Detoxification #meet #langgraph #multiagent #swarm #python

2025 Sony has a team of magicians on staff. It’s the only rational explanation I can come up with for how it’s raised the bar for active noise-cancelling headphones year after year. I really thought Sony couldn’t improve upon last year’s model, the class-leading WH-1000XM5. But the WH-1000XM6has so many new features—a revamped design that folds again, a new processor and drivers, and more mics—I can’t argue with the results. The XM6 ANC headphones don’t have many flaws to speak of. Although the estimated 30 hours of battery life is solid, I’m always looking for more time off the charger. Honestly, the only downside is the hefty price tag, but then again, Apple seems to have no problem selling AirPods Max for Sony WH-1000XM6 Sony's WH-1000XM6 outdoes its predecessor in just about every category, making them the headphones to beat this year, noise cancelling or otherwise. Pros Cons At first glance, you may not notice all the refinements that Sony made to the XM6. But I assure you, they all add up to a more comfortable and polished pair of headphones. The leatherette over-ear cups create a nice passive noise-cancelling seal, the headband is wider for better weight distribution on your dome, and it’s great to see Sony listened to feedback and made them foldable again. Even little touches like a larger power button that’s easier to press are worth appreciating. Sony’s playing it a bit safe with the usual black, silver, and midnight blue colorways, but hopefully it’ll roll out more interesting shades down the line. It’s not hard to get the XM6 connected to your smartphone or laptop. The minute you flip the included magnetic hard case open, you’ll get a pairing prompt on your phone, which walks you through connecting the headphones via Bluetooth, and then you’re ready to go. The initial pairing process only takes less than three minutes, but I still wish it was faster, like it is on most modern wireless earbuds. Play your cards right, and you’ll rarely have to touch your phone. Unlike AirPods Max, you can control audio from the touch-sensitive surface on the right ear cup using taps and swipes. A double tap plays and pauses audio or answers and rejects a call, while a forward or backward swipe switches to the next and previous track, respectively. Swiping up or down adjusts the volume, while holding your hand over the earcup launches Quick Attention, which pauses audio until you remove your hand. And if you don’t feel like touching the headphones, you can nod your head or shake it to answer or reject a phone call. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo The NC/AMB buttonalso pulls double duty. Press it twice to Quick Access a chosen app. You can program a second app to launch with three taps, but you’ll need the Sony Sound Connect appto configure that. I’m always wavering between Bose and Sony when it comes to noise-cancelling tech. Right now, Sony has taken a noticeable lead. In its quest for silence, or at least a quieter environment, Sony has brought its new QN3 processor and 12 upgraded microphones. It also wouldn’t be 2025 without a healthy dose of AI. To that end, the XM6 has AI noise reduction, which the company says was trained on over 500 million voice samples. The result is some seriously quiet phone and video calls. You also have a refreshed AI Noise Optimizer feature, which works to identify and eliminate pesky ambient noises. I took the XM6 and the Bose QuietComfort Ultra headphones for a trip on the New York City subway—a place full of random smells and noises. Neither pair of cans did anything for the summer bod funk in the air, but plenty for the latter. In terms of regular train noises, the XM6 was slightly better at muting the din without any music playing. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo Sony’s newest ANC headphones also did a better job of shielding me from a lover’s spat on the train. I typically hear more ambient sound while wearing Bose’s QuietComfort Ultra. I cued up Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me” on the XM6 and committed myself to minding my own business. Okay, I may have switched over to Ambient Sound to hear some of the juicier details, but not for the whole conversation. Speaking of Ambient Sound, that’s the mode I engage when I’m walking alone at night or in unfamiliar surroundings. It lets in outside noise so you can keep tabs on your surroundings. One minute, I’m hearing nothing but the deep bass and raunchy lyrics in the Ying Yang Twins’ “Wait,” and the next, there’s birds chirping and traffic sounds filtered in. Deeper bass, brighter highs, and fuller mids—what a difference a driver makes. The 30mm drivers utilize a more rigid dome construction, which translates into more balanced audio performance. Since my regular playlist covers a wide swath of music genres, I kept the built-in equalizer off to get the flattest frequency possible. That means when I listened to Sevendust’s “Enemy,” there wasn’t any artificial bass being added. It was just me, crisp cymbals, bombastic percussion, an energetic set of electric guitars, and silky smooth vocals juxtaposed against guttural screams. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo Even without spatial audio or Cinematic mode, the XM6’s soundstage is seriously generous. I can really make out the finer vibrations of the twang of the guitars on “Raised Right” by Reyna Roberts. The violin and vocals were just as clean, where I could hear some of the plosives as Roberts enunciated words like “night” and “taught.” But what about the low end? No, the XM6 don’t go as hard on the bass as the Sony’s Ult headphones. But I discovered they still bring the boom as I listened to Pop Smoke’s “Dior.” The bass was nice and weighty but didn’t overwhelm the violin, hi-hats, or the Nextel chirps and other electronic elements throughout the drill track. Whether I’m watching a movie or listening to music, spatial audio has become one of my favorite features to indulge in. Seriously, cue up a music service that supports Dolby Atmos or Sony’s 360 Audio format—you’ll thank me. It’s a cool, almost eerie feeling to move your head from right to left or up and down and have the music respond to your location accordingly. It essentially creates your own personal concert hall. Spatial audio is at its best watching action scenes, as the gunfire and subsequent explosions gain an extra dimension of immersion. Previously called Headphone Connect, the renamed Sound Connect app retains all previous functionality while adding new features. While I love a kitchen sink approach to features, I have a feeling that many users won’t touch more than 50% of them. Speak-to-Chat, Spatial Audio, Ambient Sound Control, Adaptive Sound Control, and multipoint pairing are all present. Something new to the scene is Listening Mode, which lets you toggle between Standard, Background Music, and Cinematic modes. The first one is pretty straightforward: you listen to your music with whatever settings you’ve got enabled. Background Music lowers the volume so you can carry on a conversation. The audio is a bit diffused, but you can still bop without losing too much detail. Cinematic mode is the exact opposite and expands the soundstage. It’s not on a par with spatial audio, but it’s the mode I recommend using when you’re watching movies or TV.There’s also Scene-based Listening. This goes hand-in-hand with Adaptive Sound Control. Where the latter automatically adjusts noise cancellation based on your location, SBL will start playing music from your chosen player based on activity or location. You can set it to play at the start of your commute, while you’re taking a jog or working out at the gym and the app will learn your habits and adjust ANC levels accordingly. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo My only complaint is that some of the cooler features, like spatial audio and Find Your Equalizer, aren’t front and center. Instead, they’re tucked away in smaller menus that aren’t easy to navigate. You really have to hunt for the setting you’re looking for. I already mentioned the XM6 has a set of 12 microphones on each side, half of which are beamforming devices designed to focus on picking up your voice. Combine that with the AI Reduction technology, and you’ve got crystal clear calls whether you’re connected to a smartphone or laptop. I was most impressed with how well the AI reduction worked. Whether I was in a busy coffee shop or walking down a construction-laden street, my callers reported little to no background noise. That doesn’t mean that they totally blocked out the jackhammer I walked by or the overhead train. The headphones muted them and all but killed any wind resistance, but certain noises don’t totally disappear. The XM6 has the same 30 hours of battery lifeas the XM5, with a quick charge that translates to three hours of power after being plugged in for three minutes. The battery shoots up to 40 hours if you disable the noise cancellation. Keeping the volume at about 50%, I’ve only had to charge the headphones twice over the course of a week. While I would have loved for Sony to give the XM6 even more battery life, that doesn’t mean the company didn’t give us some sort of improvement. Unlike previous headphones in the WH-1000 series, you can charge the XM6 while they’re in use. Instead of having to face a long commute from Brooklyn to the Bronx sans music or ANC, I just plugged them into my Anker battery pack and maintained my peace on the train. I’m going to do my damnedest to stop doubting Sony when it comes to outdoing itself. But it’s so hard when it seems like the company’s ANC headphones can’t get any better. Because let’s be clear, the XM5 landed on many a best noise-cancellation headphones list. But the Sony WH-1000XM6 has taken just about everything I loved about its predecessor and given it a big update. Better driver? Check. New processor? Yep. Actually useful AI features? You betcha. The result is a refined and feature-packed pair of premium ANC headphones with best-in-class ANC and a comfortable, albeit safe design. #sony #wh1000xm6 #review #damn #near

To mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Apple is spotlighting inclusive tools, like Music Haptics and Mac's Magnifier, that empower users to experience the world on their own terms.Magnifier on Mac works with Continuity Camera | Image credit: AppleIt's Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and to celebrate, Apple has highlighted two of its accessibility features: Music Haptics on iPhone and Magnifier on Mac."Music Haptics on iPhone" shows how Apple's Music Haptics, a feature rolled out in iOS 18, can help anyone — hearing, hard of hearing, or deaf — enjoy music. The feature plays taps, textures, and refined vibrations to the audio of the music. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums #new #apple #videos #spotlight #how